48 publicans on the sidelines, like William Bennett, who called it "scapegoating, damn it," and Jack Kemp, who said that it tested "the soul of our Party," but by the new governor of Texas, George W. Bush, Jr. "Texas has the obligation to educate all children, regardless of who their parent is," he declared. Wilson's unthinking presumption that California's worries are the nation's was misguided. His views have only set him further apart. P ETE WILSON emerged on the politi- cal scene as the latest bright young incarnation of Republican moderate pro- gressivism. Many of those who belong to this political tradition, dating from the late nineteenth century, originated in the Midwest, like Wilson, who is the son of a prosperous St. Louis family. The first Republican progressive to become a force on the national stage was Hiram John- son, who served as both governor and senator of California, and was Theodore Roosevelt's running mate on the Pro- gressive Party ticket in 1912. But Cali- fornia Republicans, who mixed a strange brew of good government, political in- dependence, and nativism, were not yet in the Party's mainstream It took the next Californian in that line, the Iowa- born Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, to bring the state into the fold. Hoover was widely acclaimed by liberals of the day, including Walter Lippmann, who, in 1928, saw him as the great hope for ending an era of reactionary Re- publicanism. In 1948, when Thomas Dewey, the Republican PresIdential nominee, sought to defeat Harry Tru- man, he put Earl Warren, who was not only the governor of California but also a builder of vast public works and a so- cialliberal, on the ticket. Four years later, DwIght Eisenhower named as his run- ning mate a thirty-nine-year-old se1?-ator from California, a former G.I. who rep- resented the aspirations, struggles, and resentments of the postwar suburban middle class-Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan was outside this mainline Republican tradition, but he had many features that gave him the appeal associated with it. He presented himself as a "citizen politician," a good- government reformer: he was an ideo- logue who was canny enough about California politics to give the appearance of being fundamentally non-ideological. Throughout Reagan's career, California served as the backdrop that verified his dreaminess. His economic theory might be crackpot, his facts fantastic, and his speeches a catalogue of therapeutic posi- tive thinking, but California was always there as the indisputable concrete par- ticular. His eccentricities just proved how Californian he was. Optimism, even utopianism, was the essence ofh1s cred- ibility. His "city upon a hill" was not the one that John Winthrop had envisioned but, rather, Beverly Hills. Here was no gloomy puritan, no malaise-ridden Southerner obsessed with the wages of sin. In lifting the G.O.P. out from un- der Nixon's shadow, Reagan, a trans- planted Midwesterner with no darkness in his soul, appeared as the true Califor- nian. Moreover, Reagan was personally tolerant, and that tolerance gave his ver- sion of conservatism a berngn, open feel. He had lived too long in Hollywood to be judgmental about people's private lives. He did pander to the religious right, but the patent hypocrisy of the once-divorced non-churchgoer made him seem unthreatening. And as Presi- dent, he treated California royally, super- charging its economy with military con- tracts. The former Democrat, who loved to entertain at Hollywood parties by imi- tating Franklin Roosevelt's speeches, was the biggest spender of them all. Pete Wilson, after his electIon as gov- ernor in 1990, was seen as the most pro- gressive Republican since Earl Warren. He was personally recruited and lured to San Diego for political grooming in the early sixties by Herbert Klein, Richard Nixon's once and future communications director, who was then an editor of the San Diego Union. "I talked him into coming," Klein told me. And he got young Wilson a job with a campaign group called Republican Associates. Upon being elected to the State Assem- bly in 1966, while Reagan was governor, Wilson joined a caucus ofG.O.P. mod- erates who often opposed Reagan's mea- sures. As the mayor of San Diego in the THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 30, 1995 seventies, Wilson was consistently more liberal than Jerry Brown, the erratic DemocratIc governor. In 1976, Wilson backed Gerald Ford for President over Reagan, earning the enduring enmity of his party's right wing. And as a Senator in the eighties, Wilson aligned himself with the other moderates, not with the hard-core conservatives. His first state-of-the-state address as Governor, in 1991, was a call for "pre- ventive government"-and a break with the anti-government bashing that had been deployed since the Reagan years. Wilson was for new programs In prena- tal care, mental health, preschool for low-income children, rehabilitation for pregnant drug addicts, and family plan- ning. He observed Earth Day with new environmental proposals, and was un- abashedly pro-choice and pro-gay rights. Unflinchingly, he raised taxes to meet expenditures rather than lead the state into a frenzy of self-lacerating budget cuts. "Isn't it great to have a Democrat as governor?" then State Senate Demo- cratic leader David Roberti joked at a Wilson roast. But "preventive government" soon disappeared from Wilson's speeches. He was frustrated by the recession and by his opposition-mostly Republicans in the state legislature. Tax cuts, which had be- gun with the passage of Proposition 13 In 1978, were having a deleterious long- term effect. California's schools, once ranked among the best in the nation, were now among the worst: according to the United States Department of Edu- cation, fourth-grade readers in Califor- nia were tied with those in Louisiana for last place. The end of the Cold War was also traumatic. The Endless Sum- mer, after all, was not built on surE Dur- ing the eighties, three quarters of the jobs in San Diego had been directly attribut- able to federal spending. In Los Angeles and Orange County, almost half of the jobs in manufacturing had been derived from military contracts. Now the bases were closing and the contracts were shrink- ing. Wilson's personality was ill-suited to an electorate going through such diffi- culties. He provided little emotional sus- tenance; he seemed to feel no one's pain. So, with his poll numbers plummet- ing, Wilson did an about-face. Instead of continuing to stand on a platform of Re- publican progressivism, he clutched at an